A Basic Study on Ontologies of Function and Fault of Automotive Lighting Devices and Fault Inference on the Model

Abstract

Artifacts that perform a function, such as automobiles and watches, will fail as they are used. Therefore, designers of artifacts need to infer the effects that a fault of a target part will have on other parts and on the entire artifact. The authors have been studying fault inference, which infers possible faults of an artifact from a model of its function and faults. In a previous study, we constructed a model of the automobile's powertrain and confirmed the effectiveness of fault inference. In this study, we apply fault inference to automotive lighting devices and proceed with modeling and formulation of inference methods. Specifically, we create a knowledge model using functional decomposition trees and ontologies for an automotive lighting system as an example, and compare it with previous study to analyze how to define the concepts necessary for fault inference. In this paper, we show that we have created and analyzed a knowledge model using ontology and obtained knowledge about how to define concepts necessary for constructing an ontology on fault inference and about how to define concepts related to possible faults in each part.